Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/466

* SPANISH FOWL. 402 SPANISH LANGUAGE. and toes are blue, or dark leaden blue. The comb is single, and bright red in color; wattles, bright red, except the inside of the upper part, which is white ; ear-lobes, pure white. SPANISH PRIAR, The. A drama by Dryden, produced in 1081, written against the Roman Catholic priesthood. Two plots, one serious, the other comic, are combined in the story, connected by Dominick, the I'riar, a fat amusing rascal, SPANISH GYPSY, The, (1) A romantic comedy by jNIiddleton, assisted by Rowley, printed in 1G53, Two stories are combined, one from C'ervantes's Fucrza de la iiangrc and the gypsy tale from his La OUanilla. (2) A long dramatic poem by George Eliot (1808), A duke of niediseval Spain is about to marry Fedahua, a beautiful girl, who discovers that she is the daughter of the gA'psj' chief Zarco, The call of race and duty conquers, followed by a tragic renunciation of her love, SPANISH LANGUAGE. A Romance lan- guage, evolved out of Latin in the Iberian Pen- insula and carried by Spanish colonists to the Canaries, the Antilles, the Philippines, Mexico, portions of the United States, Central America, the greater part of South America, and a few places on the coast of Africa, and by the Jews into Turkey and other regions in which they settled after their expulsion from Spain, In the Iberian Peninsula the boundaries of the Span- ish-speaking domain do not coincide exactly with those of the political division called Spain, since within the latter are contained Galicia, whose in- habitants speak a Portuguese dialect, a Basque- speaking district in the north, and a Catalan- speaking region in the east. The inhabitants of the Balearic Islands speak a Catalan dialect. Probably not far from 50.000.000 persons at present use Spanish as their native tongue, the majority being in the New World. Five prin- cipal dialects are distinguishable in the language as spoken in the mother countrv: Asturian, Leonese, Aragonese, Andalusian, and Castilian. Castilian has become the standard literary speech. Castilian has the five simple vowels, a, e, i, o, u, a variety of diphthongs, and a few triphthongs produced by the union of a strong vowel (e, o, a) with two weak vowels (i, u). Examples of the diphthongs and triphthongs are iu. in viuda,, 'widow;' id in ru'ido, 'noise;' ai in baile, 'dance;' eu in deuda, 'debt:' io in Dios, 'God;' iai in estiididis, 'you study.' The diphthongs ie and He are especially conunon as representatives of a Latin short e or o ; compare Latin bene and ffirum with Spanish bicn and fuero. Qualitative distinctions in vowels (open and close e and o) exist, but are not so marked as in certain other Romance languages (e.g. Italian and French). In assonance (rhyme of vowels without that of the consonants) these qualitative distinctions are not regarded ; open and close e may therefore rhyme together, as may also open and close o, and, furthermore, final imaccented i and u may rhyme respectively with c and o similarly situ- ated. Although Udison, strictly speaking, is not a feature of Spanish pronunciation, yet in rapid speech the vowel ending one word may be merged into the same vowel of the immediately following word, provided this latter be syntactically allied to it (e.g. mi qnerida amiga may become mi queridamiga, with a possible compensatory lengthening of the a). The consonant sounds are /*; a bilabial spirant written both b and v (the more frequent sound of these letters) ; a labial stop written both b and v (the value of these characters where they follow an m of the same word or an n at the end of the preceding word, as iu tainbicn and en vida ; the sound is that of the usual English 6, the sound of the English r not existing in Spanish) ; /; w (written u in hiatus) ; m; t; d (both t and d are articulated farther forward in the mouth than the corresponding English sounds, and d has a decided tendency to become everywhere the interdental spirant); a voiceless spirant that is interdental or nearly so (written c before e or 1, and z before a consonant, at the end of a word, or before any vowel, though rarely now before c or i; e.g., celo, 'zeal;' cielo, 'heaven;' znpato, "shoe;' rais:, 'root;' the value is about that of 1h in the English breath); a voiced spirant, inter- dental or nearly so (written d, which has this sound especially between vowels, as in lado, 'side;' or when preceded by a vowel and followed by r, as in padre, 'father,' or at the end of a word, as in abad, abbot; the value is about that of tli in the English breathe) ; I; a palatalized / (written // and pronounced nearly like the li of filial) ; n; a palatalized n (wTitten ii, and pronounced like the )i! of pinion); a simple tongue-trilled r (never slurred) ; a reenforced form of the same sound (written rr between vowels and r at the beginning of a word, or after s, I, or n within a word, e.g. pcrro, 'dog;' reo, 'criminal;' israeli- ta, 'Israelite;' honra, 'honor'); a voiceless s (with the value of the English ss) ; y (written botli i in hiatus and y) ; k (written r before a, o, and u, or before a consonant and in the final posi- tion, and qu before e and i — carro. 'car;' frac, 'frock coat;' acta, 'act:' qtierer, 'to like;' quien, 'who') ; g (the so-called hard sound of Englisli g in game, get ; written g before a, o, u, and gu be- for e, i — gato, 'eat;' giierra, 'war') ; a velar or guttural spirant (with approximatel_y the value of eh in Scotch loeh and German nach ; written / in all positions and g frequently before c, i — jamiis, 'never;' gente, 'people;' some ob- servers find also a voiced form of this spirant, lint it is usually voiceless) ; a velar n (with the value of English ng in sing : written n before a guttural or palatal, as in banco). It is the gen- eral rule that the Spanish written characters represent actual sounds; but u is frequently used before e or i as a sign that a preceding palatal consonant has the 'hard' or stop value, as in que or guerra; j is silent in the singular noun reloj : and in a few words like listed a final d may not be pronounced. The simple h is gen- erally not pronounced, though before the diph- thong tie it may have a slight aspiration. In the conjunction y (= 'and') the sound is that of the vowel i. An aversion to the doubling of con- sonants is a distinguishing feature of Spanish spelling; c and n alone may be doubled, as in accion, 'action,' and innoble, 'ignoble,' and these combinations must be pronounced as double sounds wherever they occur; II and rr are properly not doubled consonants, and they figure as individual signs in the al- phabet. Among the combinations of con- sonants may be mentioned ch, like ch in the English word church: e.g. chico, 'little.' Ac- cording to the Academy the written a; is a double